During every daylight hour that the battles raged, the records as well as the personal knowledge of the boys showed, the skies constantly had been swept by squadrons and fleets of aeroplanes, preventing aerial observations by the enemy, attacking the moving infantry, artillery and supply trains of the retreating Germans, and at the same time most effectively directing the fire of the American artillery, with the most devastating effects upon the demoralized Hun forces.
In all a total of one hundred and fifty-two square miles of French territory, and seventy-two villages, which the Germans had held for four years, were captured outright in the drive, and for the reduction of the German defenses which they had thought impregnable, and for the creeping barrage which almost invariably preceded the doughboys in their attacks, more than a million and a half shells were fired by the American artillery, making the territory being traversed by the fleeing Germans a great charnel country of death and destruction.
With a remarkably small casualty list to themselves, everything considered, the American forces took no less than sixteen thousand prisoners, which was only a small proportion of those annihilated in the merciless advance, and to this conquest of territory and men they added the taking of one hundred and eleven guns, many of them of large calibre and great distance range, and great stores of munitions and supplies which the Boches had not time even to destroy in their headlong flight back toward the Rhine.
But most significant of all, as Tom with pride of his country pointed out, as the boys in the approach of evening got together to compare notes, was the confidence displayed in advance that all of this would take place, exactly as it had been planned and according to scheduled time and program.
And that it all had been expected, counted upon, taken for granted as practically assured before the first gun was fired, was evidenced by the fact that every arrangement was made for the use that was made of more than ten thousand feet of moving picture film, actually portraying the Germans in their disorganization which speedily grew to a rout and presaged their early and certain defeat in a war which they had precipitated upon the whole world and practically all civilization.
CHAPTER XX
Well-earned Rewards
HAVE you heard the news?”
Buck Granger came bursting into a little group of men which included Sergeant Tom Walton, George Harper and two or three others.
News! It is the great thing for which an army looks and watches and waits. News of a campaign to be launched, of an attack to be expected, of the men who have been in hospital or are missing, of the things that are going on back home where every soldier himself wants to be. News! The word always makes men forget their aches, their pains, their gossip or chatter to hear it.